Blind Love

Blind Love was created by a team of four HKU students for a school project called Happy Aging. The main focus of Happy Aging are elderly people and the goal is to improve their lives by tackling some problems or dissatisfactions they are facing as a result of old age. Blind Love was essentially designed for this specific target audience, but ended up being of great entertainment to people of all ages.

Blind Love doesn’t work with default mechanics and controls, but uses an eye tracking device instead. As the name indicates, an eye tracking device enables users to play the whole game using only their eye movement. This design decision has been consciously taken and mechanics explicitly developed with the purpose of exercising elderly their eyes, vision and focus. Another benefit of the usage of these controls is the ability for the player to sit at a healthy distance away from the screen and in a correct position. Since no other external control mechanics, such as mouse and keyboard, are required. Originally, we wanted to go more deeply into the medical field with this game, to help improve eye- and vision problems elderly people are coping with. However, as we were not specialized in this particular field and only had limited time to spend on research, this idea was out of reach.

By means of scientific researches, we also found that eye- and vision problems that occur in elderly people (caused by age) are irreversible. So instead, we chose to focus on making a game which could help elderly keep their eyes active and trained, reducing their chance of develop issues in the future. The in game actions the player has to take also help stimulate coordination and focus.

Together with our lead designer Merlin, I worked a lot on the mechanics behind the puzzles. Art wise, I focused on the environmental assets: different types of trees, vegetation, houses, ground building blocks, underground building blocks, assets needed for puzzles and defining the overall atmosphere of the game. Foreground assets such as the concept and assets of the mole, animations, underground mole holes, story telling elements and the remaining puzzles were produced by my co-artist Floor Koens. She also kindly put everything together into one colorful sidescroller background.